About Journal of Laboratory and Precision Medicine

Journal of Laboratory and Precision Medicine

Overview and identity

Journal of Laboratory and Precision Medicine, abbreviated J Lab Precis Med and known by the acronym JLPM, is an open access, peer-reviewed, international online journal that publishes new findings from the laboratory medicine and precision medicine field. It carries online ISSN 2519-9005 and is published by AME Publishing Company in Hong Kong, China, with its official website at jlpm.amegroups.org. Launched in October 2016, it provides current, practical information from the laboratory and precision medicine field and publishes original articles, editorials, technical notes, case reports and reviews covering all aspects of clinical chemistry and laboratory medicine. The journal publishes both solicited and unsolicited manuscripts.

The pairing in its title is its thesis. Laboratory medicine — the discipline of the diagnostic laboratory — and precision medicine — the tailoring of diagnosis and treatment to the individual patient — meet in the laboratory test: it is laboratory data, from routine chemistry to genomic assays, that stratifies patients and directs precise treatment. JLPM was founded to publish at exactly that junction. Since a collaboration between its publisher and Wolters Kluwer, the journal's content has also been made available on Wolters Kluwer Health's Lippincott and Ovid platforms.

Founding and the launch editorial

The journal began publishing in October 2016 and published continuously until December 2019; it now follows a quarterly publication model, with issues in January, April, July and October. Its founding editor-in-chief was Giuseppe Lippi, the Italian laboratory medicine specialist, who served as unpaid editor-in-chief from November 2016, with Martina Montagnana as associate editor-in-chief and Zhi-De Hu, of the Affiliated Hospital of Inner Mongolia Medical University, as executive editor.

The journal's intellectual programme was set out in Zhi-De Hu's launch editorial, "Laboratory medicine and precision medicine". Hu described how laboratory medicine had expanded from a discipline initially focused on analytic technology in the clinical laboratory into the study of the relationships between laboratory tests and diseases. He mapped the field in three reaches: upstream, the verification of novel disease markers using the omics — metabonomics, genomics, proteomics and microRNAomics; midstream, the traditional core of the discipline, the research, development and evaluation of test assays, the study of pre- and intra-analytical errors, and the establishment of assays feasible for clinical application; and downstream, the evaluation, by statistical methods and by cohort, cross-sectional, case-control and diagnostic accuracy studies, of the clinical value of tests in diagnosis, prognosis, risk prediction and treatment monitoring. The editorial closed with the founding claim of the journal: that in an era of big data, laboratory data could be used in full to explore the mechanisms of disease and to advance precision medicine. That three-part map remains a fair description of what JLPM publishes.

Scope: what laboratory medicine covers here

The journal defines laboratory medicine as the analytical and clinical investigation of laboratory tests on humans used for disease diagnosis, risk stratification, severity or prognosis estimation, and treatment monitoring. Its enumerated scope includes clinical hematology, thrombosis and haemostasis, clinical biochemistry, disease-oriented biomarkers — for cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and infectious diseases among others — body fluid analytes, genetical diagnosis, clinical immunology and autoimmunity, clinical metrology, therapeutic drug monitoring, quality and safety in laboratory medicine, and new analytical methodologies.

That list spans the whole working life of a modern diagnostic laboratory: the analytes it measures, the instruments and methods it validates, the quality systems that keep its results trustworthy, and the clinical interpretation that turns a number into a decision. Precision medicine enters through the biomarkers and genetic diagnosis: a test that identifies which patients will benefit from a treatment, and which will not, is the operational form of precision medicine in oncology, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and autoimmune disease alike, and the journal's editorial programme explicitly extends the precision argument beyond cancer to those fields.

Article types and special series

JLPM publishes original articles, editorials, technical notes, case reports and reviews, and it organises commissioned content into themed series edited by guest editors. Its published series show the range of the laboratory discipline: a column on the perspective of clinical databases in laboratory medicine research, which examined the use of freely accessible intensive-care databases such as MIMIC for laboratory research; a series on laboratory medicine in pregnancy, covering emergency diagnostic testing in pregnancy and the laboratory diagnosis of gestational diabetes; and a series on DNA damage assessment for precision medicine. Series on high-sensitivity cardiac troponin testing, reflected in the journal's editorials on clinical laboratory practice recommendations for troponin use, illustrate its engagement with the tests that most changed acute cardiac care.

The journal also publishes the methodological conscience of its field: editorials on the overuse of laboratory tests and on inappropriateness in laboratory medicine, asking when testing harms rather than helps, sit within its programme alongside the new-assay literature. A laboratory journal that publishes both the promotion of new tests and the critique of unnecessary ones is performing the full evaluative role its scope promises.

Peer review and editorial standards

JLPM uses double-blind peer review, in which the identity of reviewer and author are kept from each other throughout the process, and its reviews are conducted electronically through the journal's submission system. Manuscripts are evaluated on whether the information they contain is important, topical and medically relevant; the editor-in-chief's decision options are accept, minor revision, major revision or reject, and final decisions rest with the editorial office. Papers submitted by members of the journal's own editorial team are handled independently of the editor concerned, and editorials and interviews written by the journal's editors do not undergo external peer review, while original research by editors is independently reviewed.

With a commitment to openness and accountability, the journal fully implemented a transparent peer review process for all new submissions from 15 March 2023, publishing the review record with its articles. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows COPE's guidelines and the ICMJE recommendations; its published process for corrections, retractions and expressions of concern — updated in April 2022 — provides for corrigenda and errata, for retraction where severe errors invalidate conclusions or where there is evidence of plagiarism, duplicate publication or unethical research, and for expressions of concern where an investigation remains inconclusive. It publishes its turnaround standards: in-house review of one to three weeks, external peer review of one to three months, publication ahead of print within one month of acceptance, and formal publication within one to three months, with original articles prioritised.

Open access, copyright and licensing

All content in Journal of Laboratory and Precision Medicine is published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute as the licence defines: non-commercial use only, no changes or derivatives distributed, and appropriate credit with a link to the formal publication through its DOI and to the licence, without implying endorsement. For open access publishing the journal uses an exclusive licensing agreement under which authors transfer copyright to AME Publishing Company while retaining the right to share their article as third parties may under the user licence, together with certain scholarly usage rights. The journal works with authors funded by bodies with open access mandates to help them meet public access requirements, and claims no copyright in works of the United States government.

Indexing, archiving and metrics

Journal of Laboratory and Precision Medicine is indexed and covered by the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), by Scopus — whose coverage of the journal runs from 2019 — by Google Scholar and by Ovid, and its digital preservation is handled through Portico. In the Scopus-based categorisations the journal sits in biochemistry and clinical biochemistry, ranked in the third and fourth quartiles of those categories in recent years. Its Journal Citation Reports record has risen with its standing: the journal announced its first impact factor, 1.4 for the 2024 citation year, and reports a latest impact factor of 1.8 for the 2025 citation year. A first impact factor within a decade of launch, for a journal in a discipline — laboratory medicine — that supports all of clinical practice while rarely taking its headlines, marks JLPM's establishment in its field.

Editorial office and publisher

The journal's corresponding editor is Kathy Zhao, reachable at jlpm@amegroups.com. Its publisher, AME Publishing Company, was founded in July 2009, is headquartered in Hong Kong, and publishes more than sixty medical journals from offices in Hong Kong, mainland Chinese cities and Taipei; the journal gives the publisher's Hong Kong branch office as Flat/RM C, 16F, Kings Wing Plaza 1, No. 3 On Kwan Street, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, China. The founding editorial team joined an Italian editor-in-chief, Giuseppe Lippi, and associate editor Martina Montagnana with a Chinese executive editor, Zhi-De Hu — a structure matching the journal's intention to join the European laboratory medicine tradition, in which Lippi is a leading figure, to China's large and rapidly modernising diagnostic laboratory sector.

Place in laboratory medicine publishing

Journal of Laboratory and Precision Medicine occupies the meeting point of two movements: the modernisation of the diagnostic laboratory and the rise of precision medicine. Established laboratory journals cover the discipline's full breadth from within its professional societies; JLPM, an independent open access title launched in 2016, was built around the claim that laboratory data is the engine of precision medicine, and it has organised its scope, its series and its editorials around that claim ever since. Quarterly, indexed in ESCI and Scopus, transparent in its peer review since 2023, and carrying a first impact factor of 1.4 that has since risen to 1.8, it gives laboratory specialists a journal in which the test itself — its analysis, its quality and its clinical meaning — is the subject.